In some engineering fields there is a large tendency to increase the amount of components made from composite materials, for instance in the aeronautical field: wing skins, covers, fuselage sections are components that may be manufactured using composites materials.
These components are generally made from carbon fiber and consist of different layers (plies) of composite material laid in different orientations in order to obtain a laminate (stacking).
These components are divided into different zones and each zone has its own thickness and therefore its own laminate. The difference in thickness between different zones generates ply drop-offs which need to be organized and represented on a ply model (staggering). This ply model will be used on manufacturing in order to lay-up and manufacture the composite component.
Stress engineers use stress programs to calculate the component behavior under the given loads and design engineers use CAD programs to create ply models.
So far the process of generating such ply CAD models has been a tedious and elaborate procedure involving a large amount of repetitive manual work with the subsequent risk of mistake. Engineers had to organize plies staggering and stacking manually with little or no visual help.
The present invention is intended to solve this drawback.